Monroe Work Today’s “Map of White Supremacy Mob Violence” and the Equal Justice Initiative’s map “Lynching in America” are both very powerful depictions of historical racial violence in the form of lynching, but the maps differ heavily in their intended messages. Monroe Work Today portrays the United States’ occurrences of lynching as a widespread issue that has affected all people and geographic locations, whereas the EJI has a much more narrow lens, connecting past lynchings of African Americans to the structural issues that persist today.
The map from Monroe Work Today uses points to represent the lynchings that have occurred in America based on location. Additionally, each point includes information in regard to the lynching event, such as the individual’s name, race, and some background and sources that help provide context. In doing so, the map argues that lynching was a violent act faced by people of various races and ethnicities.
Just as important to its argument, however, is that the focal point of the map is very broad, encompassing the entirety of the United States (with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii), and it emphasizes the great length of history in which lynching has been an issue. In doing so, it makes the case that racial violence in the form of lynching has persisted as a very widespread and prolonged American issue. Lynching is not necessarily unique to one particular people, place, or time.
The EJI’s “Lynching in America” makes a different argument. It uses a choropleth style to tally the lynchings of African Americans by county across the United States. In excluding the lynchings of other races and ethnicities, the map particularly highlights the continual violence and injustice against African American populations, where it calls attention to the structural forces that have perpetuated this into the present day.
In contrast to the first map, the EJI’s map focuses solely on lynchings of African Americans, particularly in southern states, which are centered spatially on the webpage. Also, the timeframe is relatively obscure, and there is no background information regarding each lynching displayed. In doing these things, the map brings structural violence against African Americans collectively to the foreground, narrowing the scope of the mapping significantly and opposing Monroe Work Today’s more all-inclusive approach.
In considering the ethical implications of mapping, Monroe Work Today does a much better job of acknowledging the victim of each lynching as an individual. In recognizing humanity and the historical wrongdoing of lynching, the map more ethically portrays that “the individual deaths are of greater significance than the [geopolitical] boundaries” in which they occurred []. The EJI falls short in this aspect – in using a choropleth map and making each individual event more obscure, it portrays the lynchings of African Americans simply as data and not much else.
Monroe Work Today also acknowledges the difficulties in the ethical decisions of mapping such information by providing a list of additional relevant discussion. Topics such weighing what is considered lynching, the inclusion of particular ethnicities, and even the challenges of collecting and analyzing the sometimes hard-to-find records are all mentioned. It seems to set a good example in considering a wide variety of ethical implications while describing the challenges of retaining dignity when mapping victims of racial violence.
Lastly, while it holds a sort of symbolic notoriety in American history, lynching was not the extent of racialized violence and marginalization that minority populations faced over time [3]. For ethical considerations, it would be important to bring attention to any profound details as such that a particular map may not be able to fully represent.
[1] Monroe & Florence Work Today. 2016. “Map of White Supremacy Mob Violence.” PlainTalkHistory. https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/?u=2
[2] Equal Justice Initiative. n.d. “Lynching in America.” EJI with support from Google. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore
[3] Hepworth, Katherine & Christopher Church. 2018. “Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12(4). https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/4/000408/000408.html
Nicely done Sam. This is a good reflection on the burden we (as mapmakers) must carry when we CHOOSE what to include in the human story. You seem to agree with the article – but I also like that you start by framing the ethics of mapping as a set of choices influenced by the overarching purpose – should that affect how we think about what is and isn’t ethical mapping?